Fisher’s big recruiting push for games, not players

San Diego State men’s basketball coach Steve Fisher drove to Anaheim on Wednesday to do some recruiting at a summer youth tournament, and whenever he bumped into fellow college coaches he greeted them the same way:

“Hi, how are you doing? Do you want to play us?”

We are practically in August and Fisher’s 2010-11 basketball schedule is still a construction zone, with hard hats and cranes and mounds of earth. He knows he’ll have 16 Mountain West Conference games, leaving him with up to 15 nonconference dates. He’s still looking for four Division I games, and that’s after scrambling over the past few months to lock down opponents for the others — including several less-than-desirable dates and places.

Fisher is in his 12th season on Montezuma Mesa and 21st as an NCAA Division I head coach.

“This has been the hardest by far,” he said of scheduling.

There are numerous culprits — late cancellations, conflicting dates, expiring contracts, shrinking budgets, television considerations — but more than anything it comes down to this: No one wants to play the Aztecs this year.

That’s a backhanded compliment. The Aztecs are expected to be good, really good. With all five starters returning from a 25-win team that reached the NCAA Tournament and could have defeated Tennessee, not to mention a talented group of newcomers, Fisher’s club is listed in many preseason Top-25 polls and already has surpassed last year’s season-ticket sales.

“They all say: ‘We’re not going to play you, no way,’ ” Fisher said.

And he’s willing to play anyone, anywhere. Already the Aztecs open with five games away from home — beginning Nov. 13 at Long Beach State — and have additional nonconference road dates against Cal, Gonzaga and Miami (Ohio). There are home games against Saint Mary’s, which reached the NCAA Sweet 16; Wichita State, the favorite in the Missouri Valley Conference; and crosstown rival USD, which took the Aztecs into overtime last year.

Not a cupcake among them.

The problems began in early June, when Fisher got a call from an organizer of an NCAA-approved “exempt event” — meaning they can play up to four games and have it count as one — in Las Vegas. Despite verbal commitments going back to March, Fisher was informed the Aztecs were no longer in.

“Long story short,” Fisher says, “now it’s June 9 and I’m saying, ‘What am I going to do to get into an exempt event?’ ”

Fisher worked the phones and finally found one — the O’Reilly Auto Parts CBE (College Basketball Experience) Classic, a 12-team event played in mid-November that guaranteed him four games.

The catch: He’d have to play Nov. 16 at Gonzaga, which is 65-4 at the McCarthey Athletic Center since it opened in 2004.

The CBE Classic also has a funky format in that four marquee teams — Duke, Kansas State, Marquette and Gonzaga — are all guaranteed of advancing to the “championship round” in Kansas City on Nov. 22-23 no matter what happens in the games on their home courts. The Aztecs could blast the Zags by 30 at the McCarthey Center, and they’re still not going to Kansas City.